Souvenirs of Murder (16 page)

‘There's no reason why you should be expected to,' was the calm reply.

His father looked a bit disconcerted. ‘Oh! I was expecting you to give me a bracing rallying the troops kind of talking-to.'

‘That would be downright impertinent of me.'

‘Patrick, they not only killed what appears to have been some kind of bird up by the altar but smashed up part of the pulpit,' John told him in some distress.

‘It's only held together by the woodworm holding hands – and a fine example of late Victorian hideousness.'

‘And took what seems to have been an axe to the altar rails.'

‘Ditto.'

‘Most of the kneelers were piled up and had drink of some kind poured all over them.'

‘That's actually a waste of good booze as most of them are full of the moth and were probably made by village ladies during the Boer War.'

After a short pause John said, ‘So I've been presiding over relics, some kind of junk shop?'

‘Neatly put, yes.'

‘You think then that a big turnout was long overdue anyway and an appeal would be in order to raise money to replace these things?'

‘Absolutely. And there's the woodcarver, Stewart Macdonald, who lives at the old smithy. You could ask him to cast his gaze over what's needed.' Patrick got up from where he had been sitting on the end of the bed and then said, ‘I'm puzzled that you didn't hear this all going on. It must have made quite a racket.'

‘We weren't at home. We stayed the night with our friends the Makepeaces. It was their thirtieth wedding anniversary and they had a party.'

‘Who knew you wouldn't be here?'

‘Any number of people as it meant I couldn't attend a committee meeting and a rehearsal for the Hinton Littlemoor Players latest production.'

‘You're in a play?' I said.

‘No, I do the lighting.'

Patrick smiled. ‘I thought you weren't supposed to be any good with tools.'

‘Not with household fixing tools I'm not,' replied John with a tilt to his chin. ‘You know, hammers and saws, that kind of thing. Carpentry. Putting up shelves. Quite useless.'

‘So's Patrick.' I commented.

‘Have a good night's sleep, Dad, and we'll talk about it in the morning,' Patrick said. On his way out, head around the door, he added, ‘I meant what I said, I'll find these people.'

‘It would be unrealistic to expect James Carrick to share with you any evidence they may have turned up,' I said over breakfast, or at least during a snatched coffee and slice of toast, after too few hours' sleep.

‘You're probably right,' Patrick replied. ‘But I shall go off to the nick, or wherever he is, and have a go at him anyway.'

‘Suppose you let me do it: he might be more forthcoming.'

Patrick gave me a look, or rather, A LOOK.

‘I don't mean because he fancies me, silly, just that I'm a woman and he rather resents being pressured by other blokes,' I countered resentfully. ‘You know that.'

‘Sorry, but after what's happened I'm not in the mood to pander to other people's hang-ups.'

He moved to leave the room, slowly as though very tired, I was alarmed to see, without asking if I would like to go along.

‘You told your father you'd have a chat with him this morning,' I reminded his rigid shoulders.

‘He's still asleep. I'll talk to him later.'

‘Evidence,' I muttered to thin air a few moments later, gazing through the rain-streaked window. ‘Who needs evidence when you can go and find yourself some likely suspects?' Like the woman nicknamed Morticia, for example.

And, hey, nobody had said this particular consultant was off any cases.

I had, during my meeting with Michael Greenway just before Mark was born, asked him for a SOCA ID card of my own on the very good grounds that I do, sometimes, interview people when Patrick is not present. Greenway had agreed immediately, no doubt feeling it was the least he could do having stonewalled all my other concerns about Patrick being involved in the Pangborne case. Which had, I thought, savagely ramming the piece of laminated card with my photograph on it that had arrived, belatedly, through the post that morning, into my pocket, subsequently been proved more than justified.

Half an hour later Barbara Blanche,
sans
minder, peered at it dubiously. ‘You've been here before, haven't you?' she said. ‘With that man, Patrick somebody-or-the-other who looks as though he's never smiled in his life. He gave me the creeps.'

‘It's deliberate,' I told her briskly. ‘So people aren't tempted to tell him a load of old cobblers.'

‘You're not a normal sort of police person either, are you?' she said accusingly.

‘No, and Patrick's my husband. I've come to ask you a few questions about the break-in at the church the night before last. Understandably, the rector's very upset. And, just to set the record straight, he's my father-in-law.'

‘What on earth do you think I can tell you about break-ins?' she enquired shrilly.

‘May I come in?' I asked.

Slowly, she stood aside to allow me to enter.

‘I'm not here to waste anyone's time,' I told her when we were both standing in the living room. ‘What I need to know is whether your husband had, unwittingly or otherwise, upset anyone involved with a black magic circle.'

‘Of course not!'

‘I demand a thoughtful and honest answer,' I went on. ‘He'd angered people with his interfering in just about every other organization in Hinton Littlemoor, frankly, in the A to Z of the whole social structure of the village. It's quite possible that people, even churchgoers, who belong to some of the more open and inclusive local clubs and groups are involved with a secret and possibly closed one that we know exists. Please think.'

She was shaking her head even before I had stopped speaking.

‘All right, then,' I said. ‘You.'

‘Me!'

‘
You're
the one who freaked out when asked about meetings at houses on the estate in the bottom end of the village.
You're
the one who everyone refers to as Morticia because you reckon you can predict when people are going to die. What's that all about then? Crystal balls, tea leaves, tarot cards?'

The woman stared at me like a rabbit caught in car headlights.

‘It's . . . it's just a feeling I get,' she finally stammered. ‘A bit of fun really.'

‘Fun!'

‘Well, I mean . . . whoever it is might be really old . . . and ill, sort of thing and I say, well . . . they're next.'

‘Where? At Mothers' Union meetings?' I asked sarcastically.

‘No, no. At . . . er . . . the get-togethers we have at Marge's house down at . . .'

‘Down at a house at the bottom of the village,' I finished for her when she stopped speaking.

‘It's only fortune-telling and palm reading and lots of chat,' Barbara Blanche continued almost eagerly. ‘And a glass of wine. I'm afraid we love our wine. Melvyn wouldn't have approved. He was rather a straight-laced man. So I never told him. I just said I was going off to another keep-fit session.'

‘I simply can't believe that you and your friends didn't discuss what went on at the piece of open ground close by.'

She sat in an arm chair and I followed suit.

‘It's best not to talk about it,' she said in a whisper. ‘People who do are warned off.'

‘Who's involved in it though, who? You must have some idea.'

Staring miserably at the floor she said, ‘I daren't say a word. I told Melvyn what I'd heard, although I thought it was no more than spiteful gossip at the time, and look what happened. Then the rector was knocked about and now this break-in. No. Please go away.'

‘It may well have been gossip without a word of truth in it and the rest is pure coincidence,' I pointed out.

‘Oh, no. Since then I've found out that . . .'

‘What?' I prompted.

‘No, I can't say. I can't really believe it myself.'

‘I could ask Patrick to talk to you.'

She looked up. ‘Is that it? The big threat?'

‘I'm not threatening you. It just that he's good at—'

‘Terrorizing people,' she butted in with. ‘I'm sure he is! No, go away! The damage might have been done already. They might be watching me. Go! Now!'

I had actually been about to say that Patrick was good at putting people's minds at rest, as demonstrated the previous night with his father. As it was I had no choice but to leave.

ELEVEN

W
hat
had she found out? And how?

This was going through my mind as I walked up the drive of the house next door, wondering if Ann Trelawney was at home. There was also the possibility that the widow's jangled nerves together with an incorrectly overheard conversation had caused two and two to be put together to make fifty. The problem was that I did not know whether to feel sorry for her or not and put this down to being unsure whether she was the one who had wielded the bottle of Jeyes and the vacuum cleaner nozzle.

The Land Rover, rear door open, bags of shopping visible within, was parked close to the house, sounds of activity – that is, thumping around – coming from indoors. Then Ann Trelawney appeared – and I did not imagine this – looked distinctly displeased to see me.

‘More questions?' she called brightly as she marched up to where I stood by the vehicle, eyes sparking with bad temper.

‘You've heard about the break-in at the church the night before last, I suppose?' I said.

‘No, haven't spoken to a soul since the rehearsal for the play. Really? But everything valuable's locked up when it's not being used, isn't it?'

‘Yes, but that's not the point. Quite a lot of damage was done and whoever it was performed some kind of black magic rite in the chancel.'

‘Kids, I expect,' she said lightly. ‘D'you like my new tree? It's a “Honey Locust”,
Gleditsia triacanthos
.'

I glanced in the direction in which she was pointing and saw a pot with a twiggy little thing in it, the main stem having sharp spines.

‘Can you remember exactly who was at your rehearsal?' I asked.

The woman shrugged in exaggerated fashion. ‘Well, you know . . . the usual crowd.'

‘Perhaps you'd be good enough to make a list of everyone who was present,' I requested stolidly.

‘Look, I'm a bit busy right now.'

‘Miss Trelawney, desecrating churches is a
crime.
It tends to have a very upsetting effect on the clergy who have responsibility for them too, especially when they've already been roughed up by thugs. You don't want to lose your lighting man, do you?' I finished by saying sarcastically.

There was an awkward silence and then she said, ‘You'd better come in and I'll try to find a piece of paper and a pen.'

Not too difficult surely, I thought, for someone who wrote plays. The cottage in Devon had been littered with notebooks and the means to write down sudden ideas. It came to me that I would much rather be in my new home right now, in the warm working on my next novel than plodding around in the rain. Not that I had a writing room any more.

‘What's the play about?' I asked on the way through the front door.

‘It's a tongue-in-cheek thing on living in the country called
Mud and Magic.
'

‘Magic mushrooms?' I hazarded.

Ann Trelawney had put on her reading glasses and now paused to look sharply at me over the rims. ‘Of course not!'

I was unrepentant. ‘I simply can't imagine how Melvyn Blanche was drawn to want to stage-manage a village dramatic society production. Surely he was too much of a snob for that.'

‘Well, I suppose if you want to rubbish what we do—'

‘I'm not rubbishing it, just trying to fit what people are telling me to the man he appears to have been.'

‘I told you. He was a complete control freak. But I tell you one thing: we would have dropped the production rather than have him on the job.'

‘Things were getting pretty tense then.'

By this time we were in the kitchen and she was scrabbling around on an amazingly overloaded Welsh dresser. ‘Oh, yes. But again I say to you: I didn't kill him. I can't imagine any of those involved in the play doing it either. They're all such a bunch of sweeties.'

I decided to make up my own mind about that and said, ‘Is Stewart Macdonald stage-managing it for you after all or did he give it a miss this year as he said he would?'

‘I twisted his arm,' said Miss Trelawney with a faint smile.

A few minutes later, the list she had drawn up safely in my pocket, I walked back down the hill towards the village. It was in my mind to borrow Elspeth's car and call in at home – walking was all very well but in this weather I would get soaked by the muddy spray from passing cars in the narrow lanes – as Mark was colicky and I thought Carrie might like a break. But I had to go right past the Old Smithy to get to the rectory so a few more minutes asking questions of Stewart Macdonald would make no difference.

The scent of freshly worked wood led me to a side building of the cottage that must have once been the actual smithy. One of the double doors was open and as I approached I could see a short stocky man with a mop of untidy fairish hair planing the edge of what looked like a door. He heard my footfalls and stopped working.

‘Ah, the lady detective,' he said, giving me a somewhat leery grin. ‘Well, it's no good talking to me, I didn't kill the fool. I was in Scotland.' He picked up the door and leaned it against the wall. ‘Damned weather. Even the bathroom door won't close because of the damp.'